Learning from Franz L. Neumann: Law, Theory, and the Brute Facts of Political Life (Key Issues in Modern Sociology)

A labor lawyer and publicist of weight in the Weimar Republic, Franz Neumann devoted his 21-year exile, after 1933, to understanding the failure of arrangements supposed to be in the line of social progress. He sought to delineate a new conception of democracy as a vehicle of social change. A remarkably effective teacher in the last years of his life, Neumann was also a gifted learner, whose negotiations with a series of forceful thinkers enabled him to work toward a promising intellectual strategy in political thinking. Learning from Franz L. Neumann examines Neumann's social and political theory in the context of his career as a practitioner, learner and teacher | Franz Neumann was a member of a generation that saw the end of the Kaiserreich and the beginnings of a democratic republic carried by the labor movement. In Neumann's case, this involved a practical and professional commitment, first, to the trade union movement and, second, to the Social Democratic Party that gave it political articulation. For Neumann, to be a labor lawyer in the sense developed by his mentor, Hugo Sinzheimer, was to engage in a project to displace the law of property as the basic frame of human relations. The defeat of Weimar and the years of exile called many things into question for Neumann, but not the conjunction between a practical democratic project to establish social rights and an effort to find a rational strategy to explain the failures, and to orient a new course of conduct. "Learning from Franz Neumann" pays special attention to Neumann's efforts to break down the conventional divide between political theory and the empirical discipline of political science. Neumann was a remarkably effective teacher in the last years of his life, but he was also a gifted learner, whose negotiations with a series of forceful thinkers enabled him to work toward a promising intellectual strategy in political thinking. Cover 1 Front Matter 3 Half-title 3 Title page 5 Copyright information 6 Table of Contents 7 Chapters 1-11 11 Chapter 1 The Challenge of Franz L. Neumann 11 Notes 17 Chapter 2 Social Constitution, Social Power and Responsibility: Neumann and Labor Advocacy 19 Marxism and Law 19 Neumann’s First Studies: The State and Coercion 28 Labor, Law and the Republic 36 Neumann and the Promise of Labor Law 45 Notes 50 Chapter 3 Power, Resistance and Constitutions 55 The Rise of Cartels 55 Resisting the Resistance to the Weimar Regime 58 A Constitution within the Constitution 61 The Question of Pluralism: Franz Neumann and Carl Schmitt 66 Complementarity between Legal Authority and Social Power 72 The Last Defense of the Weimar Regime 76 Notes 87 Chapter 4 Franz Neumann’s Commemoration of Exile 93 Notes 103 Chapter 5 After Weimar: The First Exile 105 Overview of Neumann’s Writings in England, 1933–36 105 A Cautionary Postmortem for English Readers 107 Critique and Self-Critique: Anti-Fascism 112 A Second Academic Dissertation: Can Law (Still) Rule? 131 Law, Sociology and the Puzzle of Rationality 143 The Usable Legacy: Thomas Aquinas to Hegel 156 A Defense of Rule of Law in the Liberal Nation-State 177 The Distinctive Character of the Rechtsstaat 188 The Destruction of Law in Germany 193 Inconclusive Conclusions: Law after Liberalism 196 Notes 207 Chapter 6 Neumann’s Second Exile: Negotiating the Politics of Research 213 Neumann’s Contested Place 213 The Quest to Explicate the Research Methodologies of the Frankfurt School 221 A Practical Bargain: Recasting the Research Proposal for Anti-Semitism 228 Notes 236 Chapter 7 No Happy End: Unprofitable Negotiations 241 Anti-Fascism in America: Paul Tillich’s 1938 Theses 241 Pragmatic Compromise on Natural Law 247 The Rise and Decline of the Institute’s Germany Project 254 Notes 256 Chapter 8 Behemoth: Wars Can Be Lost 259 Leviathan and Behemoth 259 The Failure of Labor and the Dissolution of Weimar 260 Totalitarianism against the State 264 The Economic Structure and Dynamics of the National Socialist Regime 283 Ordering the Classes 303 Divided Rule 307 No Law: Domination Through Organization, Isolation and Harm 311 No Political Theory—Not a State 326 Notes 333 Chapter 9 Franz Neumann in Washington: The Political Intellectual at War 339 Neumann Comes to the Office of Strategic Services 339 A Brief Introduction to the Structure and Organization of OSS’s R&A Division 341 The Early Analyses of Nazi Germany: The Pre-Neumann Years 344 Neumann at OSS: Analyses of Nazi Germany, 1943–44 349 An Alternative Reading: Neumann as “Ruff” 357 Adapting to the Brute Facts: 1944–45 360 Preparation for the Nuremburg Trials 363 Notes 373 Chapter 10 Franz Neumann in the University: La guerre est finie 379 American Policy for Postwar Germany: Analysis and Advocacy 379 The German Reeducation Project 389 Professor of Public Law and Government 397 Political Studies and the Free University of Berlin 400 For American Political Science: Montesquieu as Flawed Model 407 Democracy and Dictatorship, Summer 1951 413 A Brief for a New American Political Science 429 The Projected Classic: Political Systems and Political Theory 433 Notes 435 Chapter 11 The Legacy: Four Studies 441 Political Power 441 Political Freedom 448 Rationality in the Theory of Political Freedom 455 Volition in the Theory of Freedom 457 The Present Crisis 458 Anxiety and Politics 461 What Remains: Political Study and Political Education 469 Notes 474 Conclusion 477 End Matter 479 Index 479 "Franz L. Neumann was a twentieth-century political thinker compelled to address central issues of democratic political understanding that have unexpectedly returned to prominence in recent years. Above all, there are patterns of threat to the convergence of pluralist social formations and adaptive constitutional orders that appeared securely established in the predominant array of states, notably the rise of authoritarian political leaders able to secure recognition from constituencies compounded of disillusioned publics and interested centers of power"-- Provided by publisher "Learning from Franz Neumann" examines the political and legal thought of Franz Neumann in relation to the contemporary decline of the social welfare state and the rise of populism